Organisations are constantly looking for greater business agility and a faster time to innovation for new applications – all while managing cost efficiency.

To do this, even the most successful businesses have to rely on new ways of integrating their technologies with other reliable and resilient partners that can take their capabilities up to a new level.

Take two of our very own customers – CINIA Group, a successful IT services company that focuses on network, cloud and software, and Proact, Europe’s leading independent integrator for data center and cloud solutions. Both companies are incredibly successful at what they do – but instead of standing still, they have looked to provide new services and increase their existing capabilities.

CINIA Group, wanted to build a new Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) for customers requiring critical infrastructure and availability on its Lioncloud.

It is based on VMware vCloud Availability for vCloud Director, with the support of partner Fluentscale.

Kristian Nieminen, Director of Cloud Services at CINIA Group said that the company built this new DRaaS on VMware technology because “it was the best of both worlds.”

“It’s a platform for modern cloud native workloads, and also performs as a robust and scalable platform for legacy systems,” he explained, adding that vCloud Availability for vCloud Director was selected as one of the core elements due to its easy integration to the existing Lioncloud infrastructure.

This is exactly what VMware Cross Cloud Architecture provides – an integrated architecture that supports customers’ cloud strategies with freedom and control.

Nieminen added that this is backed with one of the best price-to-performance ratios – meaning that it is cost efficient too.

“vCloud Director proved to be versatile and easy-to-use technology. By using it, we have managed to build a cost-effective, powerful and very secure platform which is always available,” he said.

Like CINIA Group, Proact has been a VMware customer for a number of years. It has based all of its 22 datacentres on the VMware cloud management platform, giving customers who are at different stages of their journey to the cloud a number of options.

“Customers are all at different stages, both investment and technology wise, but with a hybrid cloud and VMware software-defined datacentre solution, they can select what kind of services they want to move to the cloud now, and leave the rest behind and slowly develop these into a full-cloud solution if they want to,” Proact’s Managing Director, Carsen Egeberg, explained.

He said that the biggest benefit of the Proact Cloud on VMware products is the time-to-market.

“This isn’t just time-to-market from an IT perspective but from a business perspective. [It helps with] entering new markets, cutting down costs – all the development any company in the world needs to stay above the water,” he said.

Proact’s hybrid cloud enables customers to stop thinking in physical layers and start thinking about services required for the company. It also gives them the opportunity to move services around freely between a local private cloud, a Proact hybrid cloud in one of its data centres, all the way out to the public cloud.

Our work with CINIA Group and Proact shows how we can help enterprises to confidently integrate public clouds to scale and extend their businesses, delivering agility, capacity, and resilience, and also accelerating innovation.